


Wanda 1995

by phoenixyfriend



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, WandaVision (TV)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Magic, Mind Stone, Minor amnesia, One Shot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romani Character, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-24 04:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30066933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend
Summary: In which Wanda wakes up in 1995 and thinks "It's all my fault."---Partial inspiration from "The Futurist" by esama
Relationships: Past Wanda Maximoff/Vision, Peggy Carter & Tony Stark, Pietro Maximoff & Wanda Maximoff, Wanda Maximoff & Tony Stark, past Pepper Potts/Tony Stark - Relationship
Comments: 9
Kudos: 116
Collections: Finished111





	Wanda 1995

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the Futurist](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9857906) by [esama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama). 



> So I was reading "The Futurist" and it included the line  
>  **Only Vision, and the Mind Stone, had the power and the know how to put him in this exact crucial point, the love to actually do it**  
>  Which had me thinking "Huh, who else does Vision love enough to catapult through time?"  
> I obviously picked a later starting point, in part because a person can do much more at age six than she can at age two, and I feel like "nebulous end of the WandaVision show" is a great mess to kick off something like this.  
> I have not watched WandaVision, for reasons, but I've watched a variety of comps and episode breakdowns on YouTube.
> 
>  **Important Note:** Anya Eisenhardt is a canon character in the comics and I used her to finagle something into making more sense.
> 
> Warnings for:  
> Grief for those who are not yet born (and may never be) and relationships that are no longer feasible  
> Minor amnesia (trauma-locked memories)  
> Suspicions of inappropriate minor-adult relationships (baseless, but valid from the person's perspective because they don't have future information)  
> Undiagnosed mental illnesses  
> References to alcoholism (canon basis)  
> Unreality  
> Racism/ethnic discrimination (offscreen)

When she wakes, the thoughts in her head are scattered.

She tries to reach for her most recent memory, is met with sibling-twin-giggles-about-mom’s-rollers and shapeless-agony-and-horror-and-guilt-and-grief.

Her eyes fly open, fixed on the ceiling, and her breath catches in her throat. Tears spark in her eyes. She grasps at her blanket, rough and warm, and grasps further for the memory of _what happened._

Purple wisps. Children. A man in red and green and yellow. She knows him. Loves him?

 _It’s all my fault,_ she thinks.

“Wanda?” a voice she hasn’t heard in decades, heard just last night, asks. “Are you good?”

The hand on her shoulder doesn’t feel too big. It’s just the size it should be, in comparison to her. It’s maybe a little small, because her brother was so much taller than her before he—

The voice is too young. It’s exactly what she remembers from last night.

“Wanda,” the voice insists. She can’t acknowledge it. Her head is broken, maybe.

She cringes away and curls into a ball. She cries.

\--

Wanda’s tears are enough that her parents don’t send her off to class. They want to send Pietro, because at least one child should get the homework, and Wanda hides how that makes her chest tighten, how it makes the tears flow harder.

 _That man is not your uncle,_ she remembers saying, but not quite to whom she said it. Pietro’s face was wrong, when she said it.

It’s not wrong now.

Her mother makes her soup, before she heads off to work. Her parents can’t afford to stay home to take care of her, but at six years old, Wanda is old enough to stay home for a few hours.

(She is almost-thirty and a mother of two.)

Her parents have staggered shifts, so her father will be home six hours after her mother leaves. It’s not enough to quell their worries, but it’s better than nothing. Six hours, with travel and all. Six hours alone.

She spends this time staring at the ceiling and sorting through the memories.

The man of red and green and yellow. Vision. She knows and loves him. How did she meet him?

Ultron. A metal monster. She worked for him, because he said he could help. She had magic. Why did she have magic?

She’d joined SHIELD. She thought it was SHIELD. It was actually HYDRA, but didn’t Captain America prove they were one and the same?

Captain America has been in the ice for over fifty years.

They dug him out in 2012.

It’s 1995 right now.

She remembers—she—

She has four years until… until what?

\--

Wanda sleeps and wakes and thinks. She pieces together memories, and part of her knows it’ll go faster _in_ her sleep, that her subconscious will do the sorting for her. She doesn’t write down anything, other than one singular test. She knows where her father keeps the little calculator, just the thing to work on bills and taxes. She finds it, and does not turn it on. She writes out a few sample calculations that she should not know yet. Simple things, but too much for a girl her age. Long division and exponents.

Then she checks her answers. The only mistake is where she forgot to carry a three.

Her memories are… not fake. Not entirely.

She thinks there are gaps. She feels something, at the very end, something just out of reach, but every time she thinks of it, her mind shies away with a howl.

(She’d told someone a false twin wasn’t their uncle. Did she—)

_(No.)_

(Even thinking of the _dead_ Pietro doesn’t bring the pain of whatever her mind fears.)

Her memories are real enough that she knows mathematics she shouldn’t learn for a few years yet. She knows how to use the internet almost intimately, but it barely exists yet. She knows about wars and can imagine the horror she and Pietro had, would, _will have_ undergone in 1999. They won’t, now, but the memory alone…

She wiggles her fingers and focuses on a pen.

Red wisps. Floating. Of course.

It’s not even hard.

\--

When her father comes home, she hugs him and doesn’t let go. He’s covered in grease and oil and smells like stale cigarettes. Her mother doesn’t allow them in the house, but enough of the workers at the auto shop smoke that the smell clings to her father anyway.

“Sweetheart?” he asks. “You’re not feeling better, are you?”

She stifles a sob and clings harder. “I had a dream.”

“What kind?”

“That you all died,” she says. It’s not the truth of what she knows, but she has enough of her mind-that-will-be to remember torture with HYDRA and protocol with the Avengers. She knows how and when to keep a secret.

That she is from the future will only make people think she’s crazy.

(And would they be wrong? What she did to Westview was—no. Don’t touch that memory.)

(She shies away from the idea of Halloween. Something is wrong.)

(Something she shouldn’t remember.)

Her father does his best to comfort her, though she lets go long enough for him to change and clean up. It’s been so long since she lost her father that she barely remembers him, but part of her saw him just this morning.

She knows him, and yet she mourns him.

She knows there’s a war coming, but she’s a child of a poor family in a small country. There’s nothing she can do to _stop it._

She could try. She could run away in the night, control the minds of whichever HYDRA operative or CIA bastard or MI6 wretch decided to help fan the flames of discord in this country. She could try.

But she is six. She has no team. Her body is breakable. She tires easily. She cannot fight hand to hand. She cannot test how far her power extends.

(Infinitely, her soul whispers.)

(This power is _hers.)_

\--

She clings to Pietro when he gets home. She feels power at her fingertips, begging to find his, but he is _empty_ of what HYDRA put in them. It hasn’t happened yet, for him. It never will, if she has anything to say about it. The pain they’d gone through… and for someone who _hated_ what they and their family were, really, because what was HYDRA if not just a horrifying extension of the Nazi regime and—

Breathe.

She calms down.

She builds up the edges of her grief-torn mind and tries to show her family how much she appreciates them.

She goes to bed with plans, and dreams of a future that won’t be.

\--

School is boring.

She is aware of how much she _should_ know, vaguely. Her mind drifts over the children around her, just enough to figure out how much trouble they have with any given subject, and then she gets enough wrong that it hopefully won’t be suspicious. She was always a good student, enough that going for ‘all but one correct’ should be fine.

It’s _boring,_ though. She builds up a timeline in her mind, scripts out what she _can_ change with her limited power, and scraps everything. She has superpowers, but no money, no political sway, none of the connections she’ll one day have. No king in Wakanda who granted her refuge, no billionaire philanthropist who feels enough guilt that she can ask for the moon and get it, no decorated war heroes who consider her part of the team, no gods with magical hammers or green rage monsters or superspies.

No former director of SHIELD that she knows will come in at the very last, desperate moment if they need him.

It’s just her, her brother, and her parents.

“Wanda?”

She looks up, jolted out of her thoughts. “Yes?”

“Can you translate what’s on the board, please?”

She almost forgets her own accent.

(It’s so easy to speak like an American, if she tries.)

(Natasha had been a very good teacher, once.)

\--

Everyone notices that she’s distant and sad and strange. Her parents whisper about it behind closed doors, get asked to speak with teachers, people try to figure out _what’s wrong._

They think something happened to her. She just tells them it’s been recurring nightmares about her family dying. It’s close enough to the truth.

Pietro asks, though, and she can lie to him, easily, so easily it _hurts,_ but…

“I’m a witch,” she says quietly. “You can’t tell anyone.”

He scrunches up his face. He’s so _young._ “Like in the fairytales?”

“Something like that,” she tells him. “I think the dreams are like visions.”

He doesn’t accept that, really, but he asks if she can curse Mirko at school. Just a small curse, he insists, because Mirko keeps tripping him in the halls.

“No,” she says. “Nobody’s allowed to know. They’ll—if they find out, they’ll take me away, and hurt me, and you’ll never see me again. Or maybe they’ll take you too, so they can figure out how to make it happen _to_ you…”

“Nuh-uh,” he insists. “I’ll just run away! I’m super fast!”

She feels tears prick at the corners of her eyes, hot and stinging. “Not fast enough.”

She cannot show her memories, not to a _child,_ but she levitates a pencil and twists it through the air, right in front of Pietro’s eyes.

She meets his gaze again, miserable. “You can’t tell _anyone.”_

He nods, and she knows that children aren’t known for their impulse control or ability to hold a secret, but she trusts him.

He is her other half.

\--

Wanda dreams of many things. Her memories of being a hero. Her memories of being a villain. Her memories of being turned into a _weapon._

The empty void of being dust in the wake of the Snap.

She dreams of things that didn’t happen, but seem like they might. Maybe she really _is_ getting prophetic visions. She certainly can’t tell the difference.

(Agatha Harkness, she remembers. A name that’s… no. No?)

(Stuffed into the box of memories she dares not touch.)

(She remembers the deaths of her husband twice over, her brother, half the world.)

(What could hurt so much that her mind refuses to let her see it?)

She dreams, on better nights, of a man who can’t eat but tries his best to cook for her. A man who doesn’t quite have human sensations, but does his best to appeal to hers. She dreams of a man born fully formed of metal and coding and an energy from beyond the stars and human history.

She wakes up with a yellow stone clutched in her hand and _chokes._

She will be hunted for this theft, accidental as it was.

Thanos will find her, if she lets _anyone_ know.

\--

Wanda doesn’t like stealing, but there’s only so much she can _do_ without materials. There’s something volatile in the air, something that comes from _her,_ and she’s hesitant to create something from nothing.

_(Cursed, just like the rest of us.)_

(Her skin crawls with a memory she isn’t sure is as real as the rest.)

So she doesn’t _steal,_ really. Or, well, she does, but it’s not like she steals a _lot_ or even something people are paying attention to.

Does it really count as stealing to take scrap metal people weren’t going to really do anything with anyway?

There are bits of iron from when she goes to see her father at work one weekend, little nails and nuts and bolts and washers that have been tightened so many times that the tops are rubbed raw. Stripped, she thinks, but she wasn’t really ever one to do this work, doesn’t have the words of mechanics, especially not in English. She takes the little pieces that will surely be swept up and thrown in the trash at the end of the night, tucks them in her pockets, takes them home.

She washes them, while her parents are distracted, then focuses and… well, turning scrap into a necklace isn’t that hard. She’s done more, done worse, done _bigger,_ or at least she will have. She takes the Mind Stone from under her pillow, softly glowing and _affection regret confusion_ in the pulses of energy, and places it in the little lattice she’s made.

It’s small enough to pass for a plastic gem, once she coaxes it into no longer glowing. The Mind Stone doesn’t burn her, doesn’t overwhelm, doesn’t scrape her empty or absorb her essence. Part of her was… was…

Oh. The power was always hers, wasn’t it? The Mind Stone was just… a catalyst for something _more._

It pulses, and she shushes it to quiet. Affection and laughter and a promise of _something._

“What is that?” Pietro asks, when he sees her staring at the encased gem. “It feels weird.”

“It is,” she tells him, and tucks the pendant into her shirt. “I made the necklace.”

“How?”

She grins. “Magic. Didn’t you guess?”

\--

Wanda doesn’t know how to stop a war, and she knows there’s one coming. She’s only six, but she sees a full-color newspaper and thinks _oh._

Tony Stark. Black suit, red shirt, yellow tie, blue pocket handkerchief. Colors perfectly juxtaposed. Talking about the Maria Stark Foundation, and doing work in countries like Sokovia, which… NATO hasn’t even made the decision to bomb them using _Stark weaponry_ yet. There’s no reason for him to take interest.

But he’s dressed in colors she knows, the Iron Man, and acting completely different from what he _really_ did in this decade. There’s a man in the background whose face she knows, if only from Barton’s shelf of old photos. Coulson, she thinks. He’s a man that shouldn’t be involved with Stark’s business yet.

“Are you going to buy that?” the woman behind the kiosk asks.

“No,” Wanda says. She needs… she needs a library.

\--

There is a computer at the bigger library, but it’s not one she’s allowed to use. She’s six, after all.

 _Don’t notice me,_ she thinks, and a red haze clings to her hands. She shoves them in her pockets. _Don’t pay attention to me._

She goes to the computer, grits her teeth against how _slow_ it all is in this decade, and clicks about until she makes an email profile. She doesn’t have much to go off of, and she’s sure most emails to Tony Stark, CEO and Billionaire, are filtered, but… there was something they told her, the first year with the Avengers. An address that’s always checked, an address she can always email.

She sends an email to jarvis@starkindustries.net, and it bounces back.

_No._

JARVIS must not be active yet, or… not so active as to have an email address.

Tears fill her eyes. Childish hormones, she’s sure, but it’s frustrating, and she’s not sure how much longer she can stay at this console without being in someone’s way.

She knows the internet, but all the resources she used to have, even the public ones, don’t exist yet.

Still. She finds what she needs.

Tony Stark’s home address.

\--

_Iron Man,_

_Scarlet Witch active, awaiting contact. Gem Yellow in possession._

_Requesting extraction. Three friendlies._

_Source point: 11-2023, several weeks post-Blip_

_\-- W. V. n M._

\--

Wanda comes home several weeks later to find an elderly woman on her couch, sitting with the grace of someone who refuses to show they’re uncomfortable. Wanda recognizes her. Time to speak English, then.

“You’re Peggy.”

Former-Director Carter nods. “You’d be Wanda Maximoff, then?”

Wanda tilts her head, tries to figure out if the woman is what she appears to be, and… she thinks so.

“Stark sent you.”

“Begged me, actually,” Carter says. “He couldn’t come without drawing too much attention, unfortunately, but he seemed excited to know of the situation.”

“Wanda.”

Her parents look worried, and the step her mother takes isn’t a sure one. “Wanda, what are you _doing?_ Who is this woman? Since when can you speak English so… clearly?”

Oh. Right.

“This is Peggy Carter,” Wanda says. “I don’t know what she does now, but she’s here because I asked Tony Stark for help.”

“She… did not mention Stark, before,” her mother says. Her eyes dart to the elderly superspy on the couch, and then back to Wanda. “Why would Stark listen? Why did you even think to send him a letter?”

Carter says nothing, just waits for Wanda to take the lead.

“I need his help,” Wanda says. “And I knew he’d listen, I…”

Her parents don’t get it. They still think it was just bad dreams.

“I won’t be safe here,” Wanda says. She looks down at her hands, and then at the teacup on the table. A wisp of red, and it starts floating.

Her father’s breath catches, and her mother claps a hand to her mouth.

“I’m a witch,” Wanda says. Will they reject her? She hopes not. “And… and if people figure it out, they will take me. Use me. Hurt me. It… it might be HYDRA.”

“What?!” her mother demands, voice pitching far too high. “No, they’re—”

“Still around, just hiding,” Wanda says. She ducks her head. “And they like their living weapons.”

Silence is around her for a moment, and even Pietro is tense. HYDRA is a difficult subject, and something in Wanda still twists to think of how she was conned into working for them. Pietro, though… they’re six years old, sure, but they are Rroma, and their parents made sure they knew what that could mean even younger than this. Their parents had told them, in hushed voices, of just how many times the world had tried to destroy everything they were, to grind them down and use them as the most convenient scapegoat. There are bits of other ethnicities in their history, admixture and all such things, but it does not erase who and what they are.

They know the risks of HYDRA, even this young.

“I… I need to step outside,” her mother says, hands curled to her chest. Her father takes a step, hand outreached.

“Irina—”

“Just a moment,” her mother snaps, and then sags, a hand coming up to pinch at the bridge of her nose. “Just. Just to the bedroom. Please, I need a moment.”

Wanda watches her leave, a complicated twisting in her stomach.

“Quicksilver?” Peggy Carter asks, after a quiet moment.

Wanda shakes her head. “Just me. I was closer to Vision.”

“Not fast, then.”

Wanda shoots her a look. “No, and he likely won’t be.”

Agent Carter ducks her head in a small nod. “Understandable.”

Wanda’s mother comes back in, empty-handed with her hands fisted in the hem of her cardigan. She looks to Wanda for only a moment, and the closes her eyes and hisses out a breath. Her voice is rough and stilted when she speaks. “Your grandfather—my father—had powers.”

Oh.

“My birth name is Anya Eisenhardt, but I haven’t used that name for… years.”

Wanda stares at her, eyes wide. She’s never heard that part. Even SHIELD hadn’t known… or… HYDRA might have, but SHIELD didn’t. Natasha would have told her. _Vision_ would have… even when…

“Oh,” Wanda says. “I didn’t know that.”

“They purged all the records, when we went into protective custody,” her mother mutters, a hand to her head. “This is my fault.”

 _No,_ Wanda thinks. _It’s mine._

She never would have gotten these powers if she hadn’t let them put alien magics under her skin. Not this strongly.

(A baby witch, Agnes has called her.)

“Eisenhardt?” Carter asks. “As in Max Eisenhardt?”

Wanda sees her mother wince.

“I don’t know that name,” Wanda says.

“Yes,” her mother says, just a little louder than Wanda. _“That_ Eisenhardt.”

“Agent Carter…” Wanda has no idea what to say.

“He went by Erik Lensherr, later. A terrorist with a cause, so to speak.” The elderly woman frowns. “He was active from the late fifties to the early seventies, and then we lost track of him.”

Wanda is more than a little stunned. She turns. “Mama, what kind of powers?”

“Magnetism,” her mother says. “He could make almost any metal float or bend to his will. He died when I was a child, though. Agent Carter, you said the early seventies? We found the cancer then, and he died in ’78, a few years before the fire took my mother. He left behind enemies, enough that we changed our names.”

“I suppose I can add a note to the file,” Agent Carter says. Her eyes flick to Wanda’s father, but the man remains stone-faced. He knew, probably. Some things, if not everything, but nothing he’d want to share. Agent Carter doesn’t press, just turns back to the children. “Wanda, would this be the suspected source of your powers, then?”

Wanda shrugs. “Or something.”

Agent Carter nods. It’s enough for now, apparently. The woman lifts her head to look at the adults in the room. “Please do stop me if a translation is needed. While you all seem to have a degree of fluency, some of these terms are specialized to the situation.”

Someone will need to translate for Pietro, at least later, but that’s… fine. It’s fine.

Agent Carter takes a moment to make sure nobody has a question, and then begins speaking. “We received a letter from Wanda several weeks ago, referencing information that very few people are aware of, save for Mr. Stark and myself. I myself only know because he entrusted me with much of the situation. From that letter, we decided it would be best to provide safety for the young enhanced individual that sent it, especially as that was what she had requested.”

Wanda gets a sharp look from her father. “You didn’t talk to us first? You don’t even know that you can trust Stark.”

“I’m a witch,” Wanda tells him. “I know.”

He falters. “You can see the future.”

Wanda shrugs, turning away. “Some of it.”

It might even be true, now. She didn’t exactly get a chance to learn much from Agatha about ‘real witches,’ so to speak, not before she’d… she’d…

Wanda had done _something_ in Westview to send herself back in time, or Vision had. Probably not Agatha, but who else…

“Wanda?”

She looks up. “My apologies, Agent Carter. I got lost in my own thoughts there.”

“Understandable,” Agent Carter says. “If I may continue? Now, obviously, Tony couldn’t come here himself. It would have drawn far too much attention to your family, and on the off chance that you don’t take us up on the offer, we don’t want someone to come looking to see what it is that drew his attention.”

“Thank you,” Wanda’s mother says, stiff and not a little uncomfortable.

Agent Carter smiles thinly. “We have several cover stories in mind for possible options, and your connection to Eisenhardt is something we might be able to hide in the layers of coverups if someone goes snooping. It’s just concerning enough that they might take it for the real reason and not dig deep enough to figure out about Wanda. It will make it easier to justify to SHIELD, if you’re open to the option.”

“I see.”

“The mid-level cover story will be that Wanda is a child genius that came to Stark Industries’ attention, and has been offered… not personal tutoring, but mentorship, by Tony, who would like to ensure that child geniuses of his ilk don’t go down the same road he did, and that children from less privileged backgrounds have access to the same resources he did, and before you say anything, _yes,_ there are very few people who have as much privilege as Tony Stark. It’s a rather condescending element to the backstory we’ll be presenting, but that’s the reason people will buy into it.”

Wanda tries not to acknowledge the sour look on her mother’s face.

“Unfortunately,” Carter continues, “The surface-level cover story will also be rather… stereotypical. I’ll be that you came to New York of your own volition, and found employment with Stark. We can work out what would be best, but we’d prefer it to be something that would keep you within easy distance of Stark’s home, or even on the grounds of the manor.”

“I’m a nurse,” Wanda’s mother says, not a little stiff. “Would you be able to ensure that my credentials are treated as valid in America?”

“Of course,” Agent Carter says. “And Mr. Maximoff, yourself?”

“I fix cars,” he says. He’s just as stiff as his wife.

“Mr. Stark may ask you to assist in his workshop, if you’re comfortable with it,” Agent Carter muses. “But that would all be confirmed later. I _do_ have to ask that you make a decision as soon as possible. Nobody wants me here longer than necessary.”

“Come back in an hour,” Irina says. “We need to talk, as a family.”

Agent Carter smiles thinly and nods, getting to her feet. “I won’t be far. These old bones aren’t what they used to be.”

\--

Wanda is used to many things that her family is not. When Agent Carter leads them to a small private jet, Wanda doesn’t bat an eye. She knows Stark’s tendencies, and has flown by quinjet many times. This isn’t a military plane, rather a private craft that Agent Carter pilots herself. Wanda’s family is quiet and uncomfortable in the face of such a display of wealth, and Wanda _knows_ that it’s a valid critique, for someone to have the money to just throw at a problem like this, but she’s also _used_ to it. She was a superhero with funding from Stark, from the government, and from the King of Wakanda in turn. She’s never forgotten what and where she came from, but she knows how to take another’s investment at face value, and how to look beneath it. It’s a necessary evil, to use Stark’s planes and what is still blood money, but if she’s one to guess, he’s already adjusting the angle of his company where he can. If he’s not… well.

Wanda’s known as one of the few people that could go toe-to-toe with Thanos in single combat for more than a handful of seconds for a _reason._ Stark is good, but even as Wanda is small, Stark doesn’t have his technology yet.

(Wanda doesn’t claim to be a good person. She tries, but she’s aware of her shortcomings.)

(Threats are not a hardship, even against a supposed ally like Stark.)

(She’s certainly done it before.)

There’s no in-flight television, nowhere she can put on the sitcoms that sit oddly in her heart. She entertains Pietro while they fly, making objects float and bend in the air, surrounded by her red ‘wiggly-woos.’ It’s just a _drop_ of the power that boils beneath her skin. Strange isn’t a sorcerer yet, and she doesn’t trust Agne— _Agatha,_ but there must be someone at the Sanctum. If nothing else, she heard stories of how the Eye had been enchanted to protect the Time Stone, and she needs something like that for Vision.

No. For the Mind Stone.

(It’s not Vision, but maybe houses him. A version of him. Something. She’s not sure.)

She needs help. More than one kind.

Her parents talk to her when they can, but it’s not comfortable. They know just how different she is, now, if not quite what her mind is made of. She manages to find common ground, somewhat, by asking about her grandfather, and she tires quickly. She is, after all, only six.

She sleeps through most of the ride from the airport, her brother a warm weight against her side, and the Mind Stone a supernova against her skin. They are bundled into a building and set to bed, the adults talking in quiet voices, and Wanda feels the edge of her mind brush against a familiar light, and a… web of twinkles that she half-recognizes, even this dazed.

She burrows into the borrowed bed, and goes back to sleep.

\--

“Well, you’re awake early. Can’t offer you coffee, I’m afraid. Your mom would have my head.”

Wanda rubs the sleep out of one eye, glaring. “Stark.”

“The one and only,” he says, lifting a mug in her direction.

“It’s four in the morning,” she says. “I am not accustomed to the time zone yet, but why are _you_ awake?”

“You never worked _with_ me,” Stark says, with a dark chuckle. “I’m not one for a regular sleep cycle.”

Wanda makes a face and pulls herself up onto the stool at the kitchen island. “So I’ve been told.”

His smile is thin. “Rogers?”

“Vision,” she corrects. “He worried.”

The parody of a smile drops. Stark sighs and rubs a hand across his face. “Yeah, he would.”

Wanda gives it a few moments, and then asks, “I don’t suppose you have anything child-appropriate to drink?”

“We’ve got orange juice,” Stark says. “And the only child-inappropriate drink in the building is the coffee.”

She blinks at him. “Really?”

“High risk of addiction,” he tells her. “I’m extraordinarily lucky I managed to pull myself out of it the first time around.”

She didn’t know that part. She’s not too sure what to say in response. She’s not sure she should say anything at all.

Wanda doesn’t feel like getting up, so she just gestures lazily at one of the cupboards and lets her magic get the cup for her.

“Classy.”

“I can’t reach the shelves, Stark,” she mutters. He shrugs, and then gets up to grab the orange juice when he sees her eyeing the fridge like she’s trying to figure out if she can get the right object without having to see it.

“How much do you remember?”

Her question doesn’t catch him off guard, except maybe in the timing. He passes her the jug of juice, doesn’t offer to pour it for her in fear of too-small arms dropping it. Magic will take care of that.

“Snapping my fingers and saving the world,” he says, with none of his bravado. “No idea what got me here.”

Wanda’s hand comes up to her chest, feeling at the warm little lump under her shirt, and she wonders. “I may have had something to do it. I remember several weeks past the blip, returning to life and… there was… an incident.”

He waits in silence.

“I cast a spell, apparently. Magic, not just the telekinesis and telepathy. Messed up an entire town, created _something_ from nothing. Made a… facsimile of Vision. Self-aware, but not self-sustaining.” She looks down at the orange juice. “I don’t remember what happened at the end. There was a witch there, a real one, older than me.”

“Like Strange?” Stark prompts.

“Maybe,” Wanda says. “I only realized she was magical shortly before I woke up in this time, and my memory is… blocked.”

“You think she had something to do with that?”

Wanda’s hands tighten around the orange juice, white-knuckled. She doesn’t meet Stark’s eyes. “I think it’s… trauma-locked.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“I apparently have a tendency to overreact in my grief,” Wanda says, slow and careful. “To the point where I remade an entire town in the image of an old sitcom without even meaning to.”

“Damn,” he says.

“I think… I think I lost something else, something my mind isn’t letting me remember,” she admits. “I’m not stable. I have Pietro back, and my parents, but they don’t _remember._ You do, but you’re…”

“Not exactly a friend,” he finishes for her. “But for now, at least an ally.”

“Exactly.”

Silence again.

Wanda kicks her legs against the wood of the kitchen island, and then says, “I think the Stone remembers being Vision.”

“He deserved better than he got,” Tony says quietly. “Everyone did, really, but he’s one of the few we couldn’t bring back, and that’s…”

He trails off, and then sighs into his coffee. He doesn’t try to finish the sentence. There are too many ways to do so for Wanda to guess which one he meant. They’re all valid.

“I married him,” Wanda tells him. “Or a version, or a copy, or… in the illusion. The Vision in the sitcom world I created. I married him, and I would have married the living one if I had the chance.”

Tony considers that for a long, heavy moment, in the dim light of the early morning kitchen. Wanda waits for him to come up with something, and lets her own mind wander to figure out if the adjustable-intensity lights are a common thing in this decade, or just something Stark has because he’s rich and can afford migraine-response lighting for his kitchen. Probably the latter. It does make the 4 AM meeting easier to handle, if slightly more surreal.

“So,” he finally drawls. “I guess that makes me your father-in-law.”

Her brain shorts out.

That’s not…

“No,” she says.

Stark shrugs. That paper-thin smile is back. “The other option is grandfather-in-law, all things considered.”

Wanda feels her expression twist further. “No.”

He laughs at her, the bastard. “Well, I made JARVIS, and Ultron. Vision was a bit of both, and me and Bruce got involved. I thought a few times that if he every needed birth certificate, it would be me and Brucie on there as the parents.”

“Please stop talking.”

“That any way to talk to your father-in-law?”

She wants to throw something at him. Unfortunately, there’s nothing soft in reach, and she’d have to clean up the juice if she threw that.

“Do you think you can make a new body for him?” she asks instead. Her hand comes up to her chest, feeling at the necklace. “If the stone remembers…”

“I’d have to reach out to Wakanda for some vibranium,” he says. “I can afford it, if they’re willing to sell, but they’re not likely to want to trade unless I have something _they_ want, and I’m not sure I do. Wakanda’s tech is advanced enough that they don’t need anything from me.”

“Killmonger,” Wanda says.

“Hm?”

“Erik Killmonger,” she says, the idea taking form. “King T’Challa mentioned him, once, his cousin. Shuri told me more, afterwards. I think we can trade on the information.”

“If you say so,” Stark says. “Sure that’s enough to get the vibranium we’d need?”

No. “It gets us a foot in the door.”

“Fair enough,” Tony says. “Until then… hell, I have some alloys from when I was doing the arc reactors and suits that might work, temporarily. I made a new element once, it’s not _quite_ vibranium and it’s hell to synthesize in large quantities, but it’ll get us close.”

“Thank you,” Wanda says.

“He’s my kid,” Tony reminds her, and there’s something a little broken in his eyes when he says it. “Having _anyone_ from our time is good, but Vision was— _is_ family.”

It takes a moment to connect the dots. It’s too long, really. “Morgan.”

Stark closes his eyes. “Don’t.”

Wanda drops her gaze to the juice. “I met her.”

“Drop it, Maximoff.”

She doesn’t want to, really. She wants to say something comforting, but it’s more likely to hurt than help.

“Would you like to see the Mind Stone?” She asks instead.

He sucks in a breath, and then sighs loudly. “Sure, let’s see the bouncing baby boy.”

Wanda pulls the pendant from her shirt and takes off the necklace, passing it to Tony. She doesn’t _want_ to let it go, really, but if there’s anyone that respects _what_ Vision is, both to her and as an individual, it would be Stark.

“Made this yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Fancy wire-wrap,” he says. “Very art nouveau.”

“It’s not really wire,” she tells him. “I used my magic on some nuts and bolts to mold it.”

He nods, twisting it on the chain to examine it from all angles. “You’re not hurt by touching it, right? I know the Guardians had difficulty with that. Something about touching the Power Stone with their bare hands almost killing them.”

She holds out a hand, and he passes it back to her. “The Mind Stone cares for me, as much as the stones can. It doesn’t _want_ to hurt me, and my powers came from it in the first place.”

“Makes sense,” he mutters. “You want to visit Strange’s place? He’s not a wizard yet, but there should be someone there that can help you figure out a protective magic pendant thing for the stone until we’ve got Vision. They had one for the Time Stone.”

It’s a good idea. She’s not sure if she _trusts_ anyone there with Vision, but she needs help. Given what little she remembers of her conversation with Agatha, she needs to _learn._ “Probably for the best.”

“I’ll talk to Aunt Peggy about it,” he says. “She’s the only person I really trust with everything right now, and I doubt your parents want you running around New York alone.”

“I’m a grown woman.”

“Not to them.”

\--

Pietro’s getting faster.

It’s not natural, in the sense that he _didn’t_ have this in the original timeline. He’s too fast to be human, though not faster than the eye can see. He doesn’t even seem to realizes. Wanda doesn’t comment on it, but she sees her parents eyeing him in worry. Her mother says something about mutations and the X-gene, quietly excusing herself more than once to speak with Agent Carter about a history Wanda isn’t fully aware of.

“Why are you in my workshop?”

“I’m bored.”

Stark looks up at her, exhaustion in every line of his body. “Don’t you have school?”

“I haven’t been enrolled yet. It’s too close to the end of the semester.”

He stares at her for a little too long, and then sags in place. “Get over here and help me sort through this mess, then.”

Wanda hops off the table she’s been sitting on and floats over. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Microchips,” he says. “I’ve been developing new ones to speed up work on JARVIS so he’s not limited to the systems I already have, but the fabrication method wasn’t up to par this round. Maybe one in ten of the batch are actually functional. See if you can separate out the ones that are visibly damaged, and I’ll test the rest manually.”

That makes sense. “Will it help Vision?”

“Vision’s processor is a goddamn Infinity Stone,” Stark says flatly. “He doesn’t need this if we get trade going with Wakanda.”

“Will you need to write his code from scratch?” Wanda asks.

“I have no clue, kid,” he says, and holds up a hand to stop her from arguing. “I’m almost twice your age, including the time travel. I can call you ‘kid,’ especially since you’re less than four feet tall and still have your baby teeth.”

Wanda does the math. She was almost thirty when the Blip happened. Stark was…

“How old are you?”

“I died at fifty-three.”

Yeah, okay.

She doesn’t like it, but he’s not wrong.

“Anyway, I haven’t exactly worked on this kind of magical nonsense before,” he says. “A stone remembering the future of a body it inhabited? Completely out of my realm of experience, and I can’t exactly _experiment_ about it.”

Wanda makes a face, but says nothing. She looks down at the microchips instead, and starts sorting them with magic. Stark shoots her a look, and then bends over whatever it is that he’s doing with a… voltmeter, maybe. She’s pretty sure there’s multiple tools that all look vaguely like a graphing calculator with a colored case and wires coming out of it.

“I got some books from the Sanctum,” Wanda tells him. “After the Ancient One helped me protect the Stone, she gave me study materials. I’m going to be going back once a week or so for further lessons.”

“Good plan,” Stark says. He doesn’t look up at her. “I’ve got a search and rescue planned for Capsicle.”

“Is Agent Carter going?”

“I don’t think there’s any way I could _stop_ her, Maximoff.”

“Coulson? I never met him, before. He seems… kind.”

“He’s fine,” Stark says. “Doesn’t ask too many questions, though I’ve seen him sneaking around a few times. I trust him.”

“I meant ‘is he going with you for Steve?’”

Stark makes a noise, utterly noncommittal. Wanda rolls her eyes.

It’s fine. It’s all fine.

\--

Wanda knows that her parents don’t like it when she spends time alone with Tony. She _knows_ what it looks like, from the outside, and she hates that they worry about it. She knows the only reason they don’t press harder is because she’s already proven that if she wanted to kill Stark, she could.

She lets them walk in on a few of the meetings, ones where Wanda floats, cross-legged, while Tony takes readings on her energy output and what kind of radiation her magic releases, or where he teaches her the basics of programing, or… any number of things, really, but things that make it clear it’s a mentorship, or professional relationship.

They do not walk in on the moments where Wanda calls Tony a bitch and he calls her a brat, the ones where she needles him about Ultron and he questions her about Westview. It’s nothing like the dynamic they had before, but that’s because their ‘before’ was characterized by distant tolerance, for the most part. Animosity, sometimes, and a handful of ‘I would fight for you as readily as I would for the rest of the world, if only for the sake of our mutual friends’ moments.

They don’t quite have the room for that kind of antipathy now.

“Bit like what I had going on with Nebula,” Stark comments. “We wouldn’t have been friends otherwise, but it was just the two of us and a dying spaceship, trying to get home, for weeks. That sort of thing leaves marks, you know?”

Wanda nods, eyes on the table. “I don’t _want_ to like you.”

“At all?”

“Parts of me,” she amends. “You haven’t _done_ what hurt me, yet.”

“And I won’t,” Tony says. “NATO will have to start going to Hammer or Baintronics if they want weapons. I’ve already been drawing it back as quickly as I can, but without something like Afghanistan to explain it or Iron Man to keep up company name, it’ll draw too much attention.”

“From _investors,”_ Wanda says, with not a little disgust. “Your corporate board. Are the lives of thousands really less important than your bottom line?”

“When the other option is me getting forced out of the seat and Obadiah taking over the company and killing _more_ than I did?” Tony asks. “Come on. We both know you’re smarter than that. You know how this shit works.”

She glares at him, because he’s not _wrong,_ but she wants him to be.

“Listen, if SI was a private company, I’d have more leeway, but dear old Howard went public with this way too long ago. I want to do good, but if I take it too fast, I’ll lose control of what I _can_ impact this early. It’s a delicate balance, because just doing what I want will hurt more people in the long run. You gotta play the game.”

“The game sucks.”

“Spoken like a true six-year-old.”

She throws a nut at him. It hits his shoulder. He raises an eyebrow at her, entirely too amused.

“You’re a dick.”

“Language.”

“You’re not _Steve.”_

“Yes, but this time, you’re six.”

“I will turn you inside out.”

“No, you need me to build your hubby.”

She throws a bolt at him, this time, and he dodges. “Hey now, that’s liable to leave a bruise.”

“You’ve had worse.”

“Kid, no.”

She sticks her tongue out at him.

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of petered out at the end there. Wanda DOES eventually remember Billy and Tommy, but it takes a hot second to get there, because her mind is basically going "Wow, we fucked up on the grief front the last few times, lets Maybe Not until you get therapy."
> 
> Please don't try comment about who sent the bombs to Sokovia. I'm basing the country's history off of the actual bullshit NATO and associated groups pulled in the Balkans in the nineties, and IMO the movies imply that the bombing was by the US. Whether that is your interpretation or not, I don't care. I've had people argue with me about it before and it's such a small part of the fic that I really, absolutely, 100% do not want comments about it.


End file.
